Colonial Marines dev team speaks to NYCC about fulfilling the franchises’ legacy

Including answering some questions left by the following movies.

It’s been mentioned briefly before that upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines will fill in some of the blanks left by the third film in the Alien franchise, but in a panel at New York Comic Con, the development team at Gearbox — plus special guest Lance Henriksen — spoke out about what they really mean by that.

“There were two itches that needed to be scratched,” Randy Pitchford told the audience. “Anyone who has seen the Aliens movies shares these itches. The first one is, there was some story you felt was supposed to happen after that first movie, and Aliens 3 was not it. Once we knew that universe is larger and there were colonial marines, we wished for a bigger, wider experience. We never got that. The other itch is, the opportunity to become a character in the movies in a video game medium, to be a hero in this place… we want to be colonial marines.”

“In a video game we can live the fantasy of being one of these guys and living in this situation, filling the gap in the story that should have been filled after Aliens,” Pitchford said. “That became the nut we needed to crack.”

The panel also confirmed the inclusion of fan service in the game, with a small part of the gameplay the audience witnessed including mention of Newt. “If you’ve seen the film it’s fan service, and if you have seen them it’s content,” said Pitchford. “I like that approach. Playing with that sort of dissonance between the two entry points, whether you have previous information or you don’t, and making it work for all minds was a trick.”

“We’re the guys carrying the Aliens torch now,” lead writer Mikey Neumann concluded. “We wanted to make sure we found the right promises to fill.”

I was happy with the way Aliens ended. Same as Cameron’s later film Terminator 2, both were such exceptional sequels that any following films could never live up to them – which they certainly did not.

I have no interest in other people’s fan fiction. Nor what appears to be a largely-generic, console-orientated, shooter based around the limited novelty of playing as a Colonial Marine.

To each to their own.

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